Home {decor} Tour

 We finally made some time (I must say, Nick made it happen) to get our place looking more like home. I'm excited to show some of our home improvements, but have to show more happy days flowers first.

Nick surprised me with these amazing flowers along with dinner and sweet words when I came home from work one night the week before last. He's always so encouraging and thoughtful and these flowers hit the spot with what I needed to hear.

I had a fun photo shoot with the flowers too. They are just happy flowers!

 Thank you to the world's greatest husband:)

Back to the decor touches! We've been needing to get things on our walls since December. It's been bugging me constantly to feel like I have unfinished projects seeing bare walls the past few months. Part of it was also deciding what should go where.

We landed on this fun colorful painting which I love! It pulls together the colors well and is fun and inspiring as well. You'll also notice that Owlie continues to hold a prominent place in our living room.

This vase with fun potpourri is in our bathroom and I love the style (and smell!) of it. I may remove that top piece of potpourri, :) it's slightly out of place! 

This is our reading corner. We got the chair for free (!) and added the cute lantern to a hook that was already hanging in our bedroom. We also added a battery operated candle with a remote! Without the remote, we'd have to take the lantern apart and flip the switch every time to turn it on and off, so I'm loving the remote feature. The lantern creates a nice ambiance in the room when we're winding down our evenings.

Here's what landed on our "dining room" wall.  

Close up 

 Here's the new pillow for our couch! This pillow makes my heart melt.

 Close up

 I finally got some flowers to fill this pretty vase and really like what it brings to the room now.

  One of my most exciting projects was getting all of my jewelry hung! It was a complete mess (seen below) and was a disaster to find what I was looking for, let alone untangle it.

My old necklace hanger broke as we were leaving Texas and my jewelry has been in disarray since then.

Disarray no more!

It's like a breath of fresh air to have these organized and so pretty looking! 

 This frame was made by two of my great friends, Maggie and Hannah - check out their blog for similar unique pieces they remake and sell. 

I feel like I'm walking into a jewelry store now when I go into my closet. It's wonderful! I have even more fun picking out accessories now that I can see them all :)

In other news, I made gazpacho on Monday and it did not disappoint. It's so tasty and so so fresh on warm summer days.

Here are my blended veggies plus the tomato juice, hot sauce, etc. being ready to mix with the diced veggies. Yum! If you've never tried it, this summer is the perfect time to try it. Here's my post from last summer with the recipe.

Before I forget, I just have to note that last weekend was SUCH a great weekend for us. I finished my part time job and enjoyed two whole days off work (it had been over a month since I had a day off). We went to Lake Calhoun, checked out thrift shops, went out for breakfast (twice! Once with Nick and once with friends), went jewelry shopping, and explored our neighborhood some more. Talk about a "me" kind of weekend - it was great!

Lastly, here is today's Pinspiration:

source

Sleep {or Lack Thereof}

First thing's first. I have to introduce you to our new friend, Owlie. 

Does he melt your heart or what?! It was really love at first sight for me when I saw him weeks back at Pier 1. I picked him up this weekend, as he (along with all Easter stuff!) is 25% off now, and I finally own my little Owlie for $5.21. So excited. I like to think he's reminding me to keep my eyes on The Prize - he's such an encouraging friend.

 _ _ _

On a fibro follow up, I saw a rheumatologist this week - my first time seeing one. His first question was "And why are you here today?" and he asked why my doctor sent me to him. "Because we haven't gotten my symptoms under control", I tell him. Ugh. He did give me tips - nothing new really - but reminded me to look at aquatic therapy and urged the importance of a sleep study with the amount fatigue is impacting me. A sleep study doesn't work out right now with the insurance change we're going through - I also learned how crazy expensive they are. It was good to see what he had to say at least.  

On the fatigue/sleep note though, I talked with one of my very best friends last week and she lovingly and thoughtfully helped me think through how hugely fatigue is impacting my life. I'm living at basically half capacity because I have to rest so often and am just always tired. My sleep doesn't make me feel rested which makes me that much more tired the rest of the day, and the day after that, and after that, etc. I pretty much haven't felt rested for more than a few days at a time in {lots of} years. That can somewhat surprisingly lead to increased pain and lots of other symptoms I deal with.

She told me about an over the counter sleep aid which made me excited about the fact that something may be able to give me restful sleep and not in prescription form. I checked with my pharmacist and she suggested these Melatonin pills (I found them at Target) as the side effects are less than other sleep aids and are still ok with my other medications.

I've taken them the past two nights and get this: I woke up refreshed both mornings. It took me a few minutes to realize the usual pain throughout my head (like it's being squeezed from all sides) was gone and I actually didn't feel so bad. I still had shoulder and neck pain, but I'll take any relief from symptoms I can get. It was lovely. It didn't last the entire day for me as the fatigue came back later in the day, but if you experience extreme fatigue or difficulty getting restful sleep, you may want to ask your pharmacist or doctor about it. It doesn't look like it's suggested to take long term, but worth checking out.

I snapped a photo in the natural daylight after an interview last week too. It feels like one of those attorney photos or something. Not sure why, but it feels official and I kind of like it.

We enjoyed more and more green growth on our walk last week too. It's wonderful.

Here's some Pinspiration for the day:

Source

Spring Decor and Closet Purge

 Call it Spring decorating and cleaning - I needed some brighter colors in here and really needed to get rid of clothes I haven't worn in years and ones that I love but just don't fit anymore. I had some free afternoons and decided I'd git-r-done!

Here's my new Springy centerpiece! I got the artificial hydrangea for $7, the vase for $13 (click HERE to find it on Pier 1's site in other colors) and the shell [plate mat] centerpiece  for $10 (and the square centerpiece for under $2 I told you about HERE a few weeks back) at Pier 1 and I love them! The shell centerpiece would look especially great on a darker or lighter surface. They're really versatile too and I could easily use each piece in many different ways around our home.

Here's another vase I got for $10 on clearance and the hydrangea for $7 also at Pier 1. I love these bright and fun colors - our home needed them pretty badly. As we registered for wedding gifts a few years ago I had our wedding colors on the brain (red, bronze/gold and brown) so our home has many of those colors which are great warm colors for the winter but too stuffy and dark for me in the spring/summertime, so I needed to brighten things up a bit (plus I still had some birthday money left over! ;).

I also bought a few more napkin ring holders (they were 20% off and all under $5 anyway) to add some inexpensive pops of color around here.

Moving on to the closet purge... I was up for the challenge this weekend and decided now was better than later. Time to get rid of old clothes!

Here are all the skirts, pants, capris and shorts that are going. They were good to me, but all  most are too small now. Sad day, but it was inevitable since many are from high school (ok some I bought in the past year, but let's pretend they shrunk in the laundry... ;)).

Here's the pile once I added sweaters, jackets, shirts and pajamas. It toppled over a few times. Some of you may even recognize some of the clothes! I thought of many memories I had in them as I tossed them to the pile. Some newer stuff I'll see if I can sell to Plato's closet (love that store) and the rest will go to Goodwill. Out with the old and in with the new!

My dwindled down skirts/pants/shorts/capris section.

My many free hangers! Just a few weeks ago I told Nick we need to buy more since we were running out - well we're good for a while now! ;)